Illinois man has car part removed from his arm 50 years after crash

[January 03, 2015]  By Brendan O'Brien
 
 (Reuters) - An Illinois man had a turn signal lever removed from inside his arm after the car part lodged into his limb, unbeknownst to him, during a crash five decades ago.

Arthur Lampitt, 75, of Granite City, Illinois, had the 7-inch-long piece - once one part of a 1963 Thunderbird - extracted from his left arm on Wednesday during a 45-minute surgery.

The thin, cylindrical object became lodged in his arm after the Thunderbird collided head-on with a truck in 1963. Lampitt suffered a broken right hip and broken ribs.

"I was banged up pretty good," he said on Friday. "I had a lot of lacerations on my left arm, which kind of masked where the turn signal got embedded."

About 15 years ago when he set off a metal detector at a courthouse, Lampitt realized he had a metal object in his arm.

After an X-ray, his doctor told him not to bother with the object since it was not causing any discomfort. But a few weeks ago, the arm began to bulge and Lampitt felt it was time for surgery.

"I didn't know it until they actually had it out," he said. After reviewing pictures of the crash, he recognized that it was the turn signal that went missing from the car's steering column.

He was thinking of turning the car part into a key chain but reconsidered.

"After it came out and seeing how corroded it is, I bypassed that idea," he said. "The doctor expressed some interest in it and I might end up giving it to him."

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien; Editing by Jon Herskovitz and Bill Trott)

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